Shirley Murphy - Cat Striking Back

He saw that the couple had a key to the house. The front door creaked as the man pulled it open, and they disappeared inside. He sat studying the barn, wanting to look inside and see if there was a good place to dig. Thinking about moving the body, putting it down in the earth, her corpse seemed to loom larger as if she was pressing up at the lid wanting out, reaching out to him. Had he meant to push her? Had something inside him meant all along to kill her? Again her eyes seemed to be the cat’s eyes, the eyes of that long-ago kitten watching him.

Below him the couple stood at the living room window, looking out and talking. They couldn’t see him, way up at the top of the hill the eucalyptus branches hung nearly to the ground and his car was pulled in behind some discarded machine parts, too, and a tumble of slatted wooden crates that looked like they’d been rotting there for years. Soon they left the window, disappeared from his view.

They were gone maybe twenty minutes. Not knowing where they were, he began to grow edgy. He felt not only watched uncannily from the trunk but watched from the house. He wanted to get away from there, he didn’t like the sense of being observed.

But if he pulled out now and drove off, they’d be sure to see him. And even driving away, he couldn’t escape her presence.

They came out at last, locked the front door, walked around the outbuildings again, and then went back in the barn. A laugh behind him made him jump, scared him nearly to death. He swung around in the seat, looking.

At the crest of the hill he saw two boys on bikes, heard the crunch of gravel and more laughter. Shrinking lower in the seat, he turned the key, wanting to start up and peel out. But he stopped himself from doing that. It was just two kids pedaling along a narrow dirt path that ran beyond the eucalyptus tree and on up the hill. There was more crunching of gravel, a guffaw of laughter as one lightly shoved the other. He waited, hunched low, until they’d gone.

When he looked down again at the ranch yard, the couple was headed for their car. He watched them swing in and drive on up the hill, past him. Neither looked in his direction. He sat for only a minute deciding whether to follow them or wait to look the place over. They took off across the hills, the woman’s dark, gleaming hair blowing enticingly in the wind. He started the engine and slowly followed them. Staying maybe a quarter mile behind the yellow car, he wished his own car wasn’t white and so easy to see. They made a sharp turn, and another, and he lost them among a stand of pines.

But then there they were again, a moving yellow spot beyond the trees. It slowed and became a car again, and as he rounded the next curve, they were pulling up in front of a driveway that was blocked by two pickups and a tall pile of dirt. He pulled over behind the first trees he came to, a stand of shaggy cypress with dense, low branches.

Was all that dirt from the drain the couple had been talking about? They’d joked about digging an indoor swimming pool, but no drain was ever that big. Still, that was a hell of a dirt pile. Maybe luck was with him. Maybe, whatever kind of drain this was, it would be better, even, than the barn, would be exactly what he wanted.

WILMA GETZ’S FLOWERING front garden was in fact Dulcie’s garden, where the tabby liked to hunt gophers and moles, and she would challenge with tooth and claw any neighborhood cat who coveted her tangled territory. The tabby might exhibit all the subtle intelligence of the rare, speaking cat, but she was a primitive little fighter when it came to her hunting ground. The feline passion for independence, just like the human passion for liberty, she believed included a right to one’s own place, inviolate against all intruders.

The one-story stone house she considered hers and Wilma’s together, it was just the right size for Dulcie and her silver-haired housemate. When Wilma retired from her job as a U.S. probation officer, she had moved from San Francisco directly to her dream home in Molena Point. That was before she ever met Dulcie; she had been well settled when she brought the small tabby kitten home to live with her. The slim, energetic woman hadn’t known, then, what kind of cat this was with whom she would share her life. She didn’t discover until Dulcie was grown the extent of the young cat’s talents. That first conversation between woman and cat had been a milestone that cat lovers everywhere would envy but few would ever experience.

Charlie and Joe Grey arrived at Wilma’s house, coming straight from tailing the man in the white car. They watched Dulcie leave the living room window, and then saw Wilma at the kitchen window, waving to them. They hurried across the garden, surrounded by the rich scent of apricots cooking, Joe racing ahead to disappear through Dulcie’s cat door.

Because of the steep hill that rose close behind the house, both the front and back doors faced the street, one at either end of the cottage. Charlie and Joe preferred the back door, which led through the laundry room and into Wilma’s blue-and-white kitchen.

Wilma stood at the kitchen counter crimping a pie crust, her long gray hair tied back crookedly with a silver clasp, her pale blue T-shirt protected by a faded apron. Dulcie had already leaped to her chair at the kitchen table, waiting for them, her tail switching, her eyes alight to see Joe. As the tomcat jumped up to join her, Wilma set a saucer of milk before them and half a dozen cookies, and stood looking at Joe. “You found a body this morning? You found where a body was?”

Joe looked up at her questioningly.

“Ryan called. They were to look at some houses, and she told me. I gather Clyde wasn’t enchanted.” The older woman turned away to finish crimping the crust, then set the pie in the oven. She poured two cups of coffee and sat down at the table across from Charlie.

“Makes me shiver,” she said. “A body in that empty swimming pool. I’m surprised the city hadn’t made the Parkers cover that hole so a child wouldn’t fall in.”

“This was no child,” Joe said. “From the scent, I’d say a grown woman. Her blood was barely dry.”

Dulcie shifted impatiently. “Tell us from the beginning.”

Joe, and then Charlie, filled them in from the time Joe had first approached the empty pool in the predawn dusk until he and Charlie, and Ryan and Clyde, tried to follow the eavesdropper.

“If Kit and I had known what you were going to find this morning,” Dulcie said, “we’d have come back with you from the hills.”

“I didn’t plan to find it. You didn’t have to go off chasing the wild clowder. What gets into Kit?”

“She saw a little cream-colored cat,” Dulcie said. “It was so strange, Kit felt an instant rapport with her, an instant friendship. She seems totally possessed by the little waif.”

“Kit gets possessed,” Joe said. “Some wild idea takes hold of her and she can think of nothing else.”

Charlie and Wilma exchanged a look. There was no turning Kit aside when she got her claws into a new passion.

Dulcie said, “She got as excited as if she’d discovered a long-lost sister. And the young cat seemed just as fascinated.”

Wilma said, “Maybe no one will ever understand Kit-and isn’t that half her charm?” She looked at Joe. “This meeting between Kit and the little waif happened at the same time you came on the murder scene?”

“It did,” the tomcat said. “So?” He scowled up at Wilma, his white-tipped paws kneading irritably at the chair cushion. “You’re not saying there’s some connection!” Wilma was no more given to flighty imaginings than was he.

Charlie watched her aunt. “What are you saying?”